NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4080/4090: Windows 11 vs. Ubuntu 23.04 Performance

For those wondering how the NVIDIA Linux gaming/GPU performance is looking relative to Windows 11, here are some benchmarks using the GeForce RTX 4080 and RTX 4090 graphics cards. Both NVIDIA RTX 40 graphics cards were tested on Windows 11 Pro and Ubuntu 23.04 while primarily focusing on games making use of Valve's Steam Play to reflect current Linux gaming trends as well as featuring some other cross-platform GPU accelerated software.

While recently having a fresh Windows 11 install for the Windows vs. Linux testing of the AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D CPU, I also took the opportunity for a fresh look at the Windows vs. Linux gaming performance. In today's article both the GeForce RTX 4080 and RTX 4090 graphics cards were tested as the only RTX 40 series graphics cards currently available at Phoronix for Linux benchmarking.

The same system was used for both the Windows 11 Pro and Ubuntu 23.04 testing built around the Ryzen 7 7800X3D with ASUS ROG CROSSHAIR X670E HERO motherboard, 2 x 16GB DDR5-6000 memory, and 2TB Solidigm P44 Pro NVMe SSD. The RTX 4080 and RTX 4090 with Windows were using the NVIDIA 531.61 driver as the latest available there while the newest Linux driver as of testing was the 530.41.03 build.

This round of testing is quite straight-forward so let's get right to these results. In addition to the gaming results are also a number of Windows vs. Linux GPU compute tests as well like OpenCL compute workloads and Blender 3D rendering.